Do you think in analogue or digital?

[gordonartist]

Hell breaks loose after Cornell claim.

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Published Saturday 2nd July 2005 11:10

A new study conducted at Cornell University suggests that we think in analog, not digital. It's a bold claim which, if true, threatens to make thirty years of linguistics and neuroscience metaphors look very silly indeed.

Professor Michael Spivey, a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell claims that the mind "should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey."

Are brains analog, or digital in the same difference between the way analog and computers work. And The Professor wants you to know this. Although he says it in a funny sort of psycho-babble.

For example, Spivey eschews the word "brain" in his research, making the heroic leap to the word "mind" to explain his discoveries. I'm not telling you about your brain, he's saying, but about your mind. Yes, yours.

Some may think this very presumptious, but in fact this isn't uncommon in the jargon employed by fringe areas of enquiry today. For example, the Anglo-American "philosophy" camp has an exciting project, "The Philosophy of the Mind".

Revelations such as "thermostats have souls," are considered a major breakthrough, apparently. Members of this camp earnestly discuss whether the mind is more like a worn-out, replaceable drive belt, or whether it's more like a DLL in a Windows-like operating system.

But groups like this are plentiful on the internet, a place where you'll find people who believe vapor trails are impregnated with mind-controlling dye. In each case (as opposed to Confuscian or Hindu and Buddhist thinking), the mind is fairly oily, and ugly, and eminently disposable component.

OOOPS.

I thought I was odd!

Take care,

Gordon.